Social Psychology Quotes

“In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. KNOWING A MAN WELL NEVER LEADS TO HATE and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. TRY TO UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER!”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“Why do people want to talk to each other? I mean, what are the things people always want to find out about other people?”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo

“The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“إن الكثيرين لا يريدون منا حلاًّ لمشكلاتهم، بقدر ما يريدون القلب الذي يتوجَّع ويتأسَّى، وكما قيل:
ولابد من شكوى إلى ذِي مَروءةٍ يواسيك أو يسليك أو يتوجَّعُ”
― سلمان العودة, بناتي

“The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“There is one thing that, more than any other, throws people absolutely off their balance — the thought that you are dependent upon them. This is sure to produce an insolent and domineering manner towards you. There are some people, indeed, who become rude if you enter into any kind of relation with them; for instance, if you have occasion to converse with them frequently upon confidential matters, they soon come to fancy that they can take liberties with you, and so they try and transgress the laws of politeness. This is why there are so few with whom you care to become more intimate, and why you should avoid familiarity with vulgar people. If a man comes to think that I am more dependent upon him than he is upon me, he at once feels as though I had stolen something from him; and his endeavor will be to have his vengeance and get it back. The only way to attain superiority in dealing with men, is to let it be seen that you are independent of them.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims

“Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.”
― Stanley Milgram

“Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?”
― Philip Zimbardo

“Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“One can't live mindfully without being enmeshed in psychological processes that are around us.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, which are common to man, those drives which make for the differences in men's characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process. The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function - although it has that too - but it has also a creative function.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“She wasn’t interested in making other people comfortable, which I really liked about her.”
― Amy Tintera, Listen for the Lie

“By what criteria can one decide which of a person's countless beliefs are primitive? The essential factor is that they are taken for granted: a person's primitive beliefs represent the basic truths he holds about physical reality, social reality, and himself and his own nature. Like all beliefs, conscious or unconscious, they have a personal aspect: they are rooted in the individual's experience and in the evidence of his senses. Like all beliefs, they also have a social aspect: with regard to every belief a person forms, he also forms some notion of how many other people have the experience and the knowledge necessary to share it with him, and of how close the agreement is among this group. Unlike other beliefs, however, primitive beliefs are normally not open to discussion or controversy. Either they do not come up in conversation because everyone shares them and everyone takes them for granted, or, if they do come up, they are virtually unassailable by outside forces. The criterion of social support is totally rejected; it is as if the individual said: "Nobody else could possibly know or have experienced what I have." Or, to quote a popular refrain: "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen."
 A person's primitive beliefs thus lie at the very core of his total system of beliefs, and they represent the subsystem in which he has the heaviest emotional commitment.”
― Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Psychological Study

“You are, of course, aware that social silences have varied textures, and these textures communicate a great deal.”
― David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“But I want to caution you, what I am telling you is not for you to judge people. It is simply to help you understand that pain changes people. Sometimes forever.”
― LaShonda C. Henderson, Selah The Myth of Love Life Stories

“Many of us believe that we follow an inner moral compass, but the history of social psychology richly demonstrates that other people exert a powerful force, able to make cruelty seem acceptable and altruism seem embarrassing, without giving us any reasons or arguments.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“. . . almost EVERYTHING we look at triggers a tiny flash of affect . . . [social psychologist Robert] Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image just by showing it to them several times. The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the "mere exposure" affect and it is a basic principle of advertising.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“Because appearing concerned about other people's opinions makes us look weak, we (like politicians) often deny that we care about public opinion polls. But the fact is that we care a lot about what others think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“The difference between "can" and "must" is the key to understanding the profound effects of self-interest on reasoning . . . The social psychologist Tom Gilovich studies the cognitive mechanisms of strange beliefs. His simple formulation is that when we WANT to believe something, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe it?" Then, we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification, in case anyone asks. In contrast, when we DON'T want to believe something, we ask ourselves, "Must I believe it?" Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it. You only need one key to unlock the handcuffs of "must." Psychologists now have file cabinets full of findings on "motivated reasoning," showing the many tricks people use to reach the conclusions they want to reach.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“. . . decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences . . . Rather, people care about their GROUPS, whether those be racial, regional, religious, or political . . . Political opinions function as "badges of social membership." They're like the array of bumper stickers people put on their cars showing the political causes, universities, and sports teams they support. Our politics is groupish, not selfish.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“Unconscious bias toward people who are of the same race, education level, economic status, and have the same values and taste influences who we trust. We subconsciously look for points of similarity in everyone we meet because similarities make us feel safer. Even if it’s a fallacy.”
― Elle Jauffret

“Most people can see that dictators are not extraordinary people in any way, yet they are credited with single-handedly assembling and upholding tyrannies.”
― Heather Marsh, How to Dismantle a Dictatorship

“Prefer a sincere stab than a fake smile”
― MIGUEL ANGEL SAEZ GUTIERREZ

“It’s hard to control other people’s reaction to your behavior, what you can control is your behavior”
― Lynn Ujiagbe

“Malamuth, Sockloskie, Koss, and Tanaka (1991) proposed a model of the characteristics of aggressors that suggests that coercive sex may be conceptualized as resulting from the convergence of (1) relatively high levels of ‘impersonal’ sex and (2) hostile, dominating characteristics… According to this model, the determinants of coercive sex can often be traced to early home experiences and parent–child interactions… Individuals experiencing this type of home environment may develop negative views of male–female relationships, which may foster a relatively impersonal orientation to sexuality, a hostile ‘schema’ about social relationships, or both.” (pp. 281–282)”
― David M. Buss, Sex, Power, Conflict: Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives